


Rarely Pure and Never Simple

by killabeez



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Community: salt_burn_porn, M/M, Post-Episode: s14e20 Moriah, Season/Series 14, Truth Spells
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-19
Updated: 2019-09-19
Packaged: 2020-10-24 07:00:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20701838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/killabeez/pseuds/killabeez
Summary: “Do you watch us? When you're not here, are—are you watching us?”“Sam...you and your brother, of all the Sams and Deans in all the multiverse, you're my favorite. You're just so interesting. I mean, like that thing that happened at the office earlier today—that was crazy, right?”—Sam and Chuck, “Moriah”





	Rarely Pure and Never Simple

**Author's Note:**

> Written in a couple of hours for de_nugis's prompt, "get in line." Not beta'ed—all mistakes and rough bits are mine.

“I’ll stop talking,” Dean says, when Jack’s truth spell is in full effect and they’re barricaded in the office with all Zuckerberg hell raging outside. It’s a good plan. A solid plan. He should have thought of it sooner, before—well, before.

* * *

Rewind about twenty minutes. They’d been lucky enough to find a room with a computer in it, but the facial recognition system required a login. Sam cautiously peeked out into the rising bedlam and asked a passing employee, “Hey. What’s your password?” Dean raised an eyebrow in appreciation when she told him, capitals and special characters included.

“Smart,” Dean said without thinking. Sam gave him a surprised, pleased glance, and Dean’s face warmed. Right. “Shut up,” he said. _Dammit._

“I didn’t say anything,” Sam said, but he still wore that shy, soft expression that Dean had spent a lifetime bulletproofing himself against. 

Sam sat back down in front of the computer and started typing, but was it Dean’s imagination, or was he blushing? Dean frowned. Outside the office, something crashed to the floor. The urge to keep saying words felt like a heavy, tight pressure around his throat, or maybe somewhere in the vicinity of his sinuses; it was like he could feel them welling up from somewhere deep inside, trying to force their way out of his mouth. Of course. Because this was the worst possible time for their particular Titanic-sized boatload of issues.

Crap. This was worse than not being able to lie. Whatever Jack had done, it was more like the urge to tell the truth—or maybe all the truths—had become suddenly urgent and overwhelming. Which, come to think of it, explained the chaos on the other side of that door.

Dean bit his tongue in self-defense, and it seemed to help. Maybe a lifetime of shoving the messed-up snake pit of his psyche into ever-more-secure boxes of denial was good for something. He wasn’t sure how they were going to find Jack and manage to stop him without serious collateral damage, but he was willing to give it a shot, even if it meant communicating in hand signals and wordless grunts.

As if on cue, Sam’s phone buzzed. He fished it out of his Fed coat and glanced at the display.

“Oh, no.” 

As soon as he said it, he shot Dean a glance that was so transparently guilty, Dean might have laughed if he hadn’t been in the midst of dealing with his own internal crisis. “It’s Rowena,” Sam confessed, and showed Dean the display.

“So?”

Sam’s face twisted, and color rode high on his cheeks. “Dean,” he pleaded. “I can’t. You have to talk to her.” He thrust the phone in Dean’s direction.

“What the hell?" Dean took the phone, still mystified. Rowena always called Sam, not him. Ever since the two of them had bonded over Lucifer, they’d had some sort of mutual understanding that he—oh. _Oh._

He raised an eyebrow. “Seriously?”

Sam made a helpless gesture, his expression one Dean remembered with crystal clarity from when Sam had been thirteen and popping embarrassing boners at every passing breeze. “Dude. Trust me. I cannot talk to her right now.” He sounded a little desperate. “Please don’t ask me.”

“Oh, I am totally one hundred percent asking you. That’s not even a question.” He answered the call and hit speaker phone. “Hi, Rowena.”

“There’s a problem,” she said, and then paused. “Dean?”

“Yeah, it’s me. Sam made me take the call.” He gave Sam a little shrug of apology. It wasn’t his fault; he didn’t make the rules. “What’s up?”

“Billie won’t deal. She says this is your mess—yours and Chuck’s—and she wants no part of it. Whatever souls she might have access to in the Veil, she says we’re on our own.”

“So, no soul bomb.”

“Not at the scale it would take to make a dent in a being with Jack’s kind of power. Unless you have other ideas about how to harness several hundred thousand souls at a moment’s notice?”

Dean, still watching Sam, said, “We’ll work on it.” He hesitated. A good brother would hang up now. And Rowena might actually kill him, but— “I think my brother has a massive crush on you,” he said, before he could stop himself.

“I know,” Rowena said without hesitation. “It’s adorable. And I assure you, I would hit that in a hot minute.”

“Get in line,” Dean replied, and—he really should have seen that coming. 

* * *

Fast forward a week and a half. In the interim, Chuck killed Jack and Sam shot him for it, Cas returned to Heaven to take command of the Host, all the souls ever interred in Hell were released, and the world went to absolute shit. In other words, business as usual.

They’re in Nowheresville, Illinois, when the other shoe finally drops. The Roosevelt Asylum hunt was a son of a bitch the first time around, and Ellicott’s ghost tries his best to fuck them up again, but the fourteen years since they sent him to Hell the last time might as well be an eternity. This time, they know better and they stick together, so Ellicott can’t use them against each other. The memories don’t rest easy; it’s been several lifetimes, but Dean still remembers what it felt like when Sam pointed a gun at him and pulled the trigger, believing it was loaded. Still remembers Sam saying, _I'm just telling the truth for the first time._ How the blast from his shotgun had hurt like a motherfucker, but nowhere near as bad as the look on Sam’s face.

Afterwards, they get in the car and drive, not stopping until they’ve put a hundred miles between them and Rockford. Sam’s quietly brooding (_Those are definitely your brooding and pensive shoulders,_ Dean thinks without meaning to), and Dean doesn’t have to ask to know what Sam’s thinking. After Ellicott, their next hunt was in Lawrence—the poltergeist tormenting the mom and kids who’d moved into their old house. Poltergeists aren’t technically spirits, though, so will they have to kill the thing again? He sincerely hopes not. The thought of going back there now feels like walking on glass, for more reasons than he can count.

“I’m fucking wiped, man,” he says, as they’re coming up on a random exit he’s pretty sure they’ve never stopped at before. “You okay if we stop for the night?”

“Sure,” Sam says. “Sounds good.” He sounds like he’s a million miles away.

They haven’t been home since Jack died. They’ve been going at it non-stop ever since, and “home” is starting to sound like a distant memory. It feels like a thousand years have passed since they put their mom on a pyre and burned her, and Dean can’t remember the last time he slept more than thirty minutes at a time.

He’s reasonably certain they’ve never stayed at the Relax Inn before, but the feeling of déjà vu is intense. He tries his best to ignore it, taking first shower by right of a) being the oldest, and b) Sam being so deep in his funk that he doesn’t bother to call it, but the immensity of the silence between them has gotten so intense that he isn’t surprised when Sam finally draws the line.

“Listen,” he says, when Dean emerges from the bathroom, towel wrapped around his waist. “We need to talk.”

“Do we, though?” Dean asks, only half joking. “Legitimate question.”

Sam sighs. “Dean.” He’s sitting on the bed furthest from the door, knees spread, hands clasped loosely between them, and he looks like he wishes he were anyplace—maybe anyone—else. For his part, Dean wishes he was wearing more than a towel.

He moves over to rummage through his duffel on a chair, because he's afraid of what Sam might be able to see in his face. “What do you want me to say? We’re fucked up about each other. It’s not like it’s new.” It comes out sounding normal, but his face and chest feel hot, his pulse heavy in his throat. They don’t talk about this—not ever. It’s rule number one, and has been since the first time they crossed the line between being brothers and whatever else they are, back when they were kids. The last few years, they’ve almost been able to put it behind them; the more normal their lives got, the more their immediate family expanded, the more distance they’ve managed to put between them, until the fiction that they were just normal brothers with normal brotherly feelings toward each other grew solid enough that even they’d started to believe it.

For a long moment, Sam doesn’t say anything, and Dean can't stand not knowing what look is on his brother's face, so he looks back over his shoulder, unable to help himself.

It's worse than he thought. He's never been able to resist Sam when he gets like this—half pleading, half stubborn, one hundred percent the guy who thinks Dean is the beginning and the end of the universe. Dean's stomach sinks, and he knows Sam is serious. He's not going to let this go.

Sure enough, Sam says, flat, “You were just going to die. Just kill Jack, just like that, and sacrifice yourself, and leave me. After everything.”

It feels like—for a second, Dean wonders if, somehow, Jack’s truth spell has been reactivated. “Sam,” is all he can think to say.

“It’s b.s.” Sam says. “All of it. I won’t.”

“Fuck you,” Dean says without thinking. “You’re one to talk. I thought you were dead, like, three weeks ago. And like, twice before that—just in the last year.”

Sam only looks at him, like, _exactly,_ and Dean’s insides spiral into a tight knot. “So, what are we going to do about it?” Sam asks.

Dean stands on a precipice. He’s admitted nothing; not really. Not anything Sam didn’t already know. But he feels like he’s been laid open, his guts spread out in plain sight. “What do you want to do?” he asks in a voice he barely recognizes.

Sam’s face is the most familiar thing to him in the entire world. It’s so critical to his existence, he’s not sure how he could get up in the morning and navigate the day without the touchstone of every tiny degree of expression on that face. He’s pretty much burned everything to the ground whenever someone’s tried to take that away from him. So when Sam answers him, his expression wide open and honest, it stabs straight to the heart of who Dean is.

“It wasn’t actually terrible, was it?” he asks. “What Jack did.”

“What—you mean his super-powered truth spell?” Dean is at sea, trying to catch up.

“Yeah,” Sam says. “I mean, I kind of get where he was coming from.”

“Sure,” Dean says, “if you ignore the whole part about humanity being hopeless trash bags.”

“Maybe we wouldn’t be, though, if we were all a little more honest with each other.”

Dean deeply wishes he were wearing more clothes for this conversation. “You're kind of freaking me out, dude. Can we just…cut to the chase?”

Sam’s expression quirks in a wry smile. “You sure about that?”

Dean’s not, but something tells him it'll be worth it. “You’ve got exactly thirty seconds,” he warns.

And Sam stands up. It’s been a long, long fucking couple of months—a long few years before that. The last time they did anything, it was after Sam almost died at the hands of that douchebag werewolf, and that had been so quiet and furtive, a desperate reclamation that neither of them had acknowledged afterwards. Dean’s been telling himself for years that him and Sam, they’ve moved on—that they’re not the same people they were when they were kids. It seemed true enough. But their whole world has been turned on end, over and over, and Sam’s the only constant.

“We could try it,” Sam says. “Just for tonight.”

“What?” Dean asks, stupidly.

“Telling the truth. Telling each other the truth, for once.” Sam’s face is alight, alive with degrees of expression Dean doesn’t know how to name. “Just for tonight.”

It sounds like the worst idea either of them’s ever had. Every fiber of Dean’s being rejects the whole concept—but Sam’s asking him, and he’s never really been proof against his brother when he really wants something.

“Give me an hour,” Sam says. “Half an hour.” He reaches out, his fingertips resting at the edge of Dean’s towel. “After that, you can tap out. I promise.”

Dean’s heart beats fast and thready. A lot of damage can be done in half an hour. He might not survive it; _they_ might not.

“I’ll start,” Sam says. He swallows, tracing the edge of Dean’s towel. “I dream about us sometimes. How it used to be.”

Dean’s pulse skips unevenly. “Yeah?” Christ, Sam's barely touched him, but his whole body lights up with it, instantly wanting more.

“Yes,” Sam replies without hesitation. “More, lately. I don’t know why. I think because—” He stops.

“Tell me,” Dean says.

Sam ducks his head, his eyes hidden by his hair. “We used to keep so much from each other,” he says. “But somewhere in the last few years, it seems like we stopped doing that. And we can still fuck each other up, but—”

“Yeah,” Dean says, surprising himself. “I get it.” Especially in the last year, since Michael, it’s like he’s been too tired to keep things from Sam, and it’s been…good. Small consolation maybe, for all they’ve been through, but good. Even when they were at odds over Jack, over the Ma'lak box, over Dean deciding to wield Chuck’s stupid God gun, it was like they’d finally stopped trying to pretend they could ever be anything but what they are.

Sam’s eyes lift to his, and Dean thinks, _fuck it. Fuck all of it._ Except for this, and in the face of God, and Heaven, and all of it—fuck it. 

“I miss you,” Sam says, like it hurts him. “It’s been so long.”

“Yeah. Me, too,” Dean says after a long, agonizing moment. And then it’s easy all of a sudden; it’s like Sam’s found the key to unlock something he hasn’t had words for his entire life. “I want—” He stops.

“Just tell me,” Sam urges. “Anything. I don’t care. No one knows where we are.” He spreads his hands against Dean’s waist and bends his face to Dean’s neck. “No one has to know.”

A tangle of shame and years-deep denial twists in Dean’s gut, but it does nothing to dampen the way his body responds to Sam’s hands on him. And that’s the heart of it, isn’t it? They’ve managed to keep this from everyone, keep it secret from the whole world, or so they thought. Their mom came back, and Bobby did, and even their dad, and none of it was real. They’d pushed this down and tried to put it behind them, but in the end—

_Fuck it._

Dean unwinds the knot of his towel and lets it fall to the floor. He twists one hand in Sam’s hair. “Take these off,” he orders, tugging at Sam’s white dress shirt, his belt, with one hand. Sam hurries to comply. Dean unbuckles the belt while Sam wrestles his shirt off, and together they manage to get Sam undressed in record time. And finally, both naked, they come together without pretense or barriers. 

Sam makes a low sound when Dean kisses him, and it does things to Dean he can’t even begin to name. His brother is hard and hot against him. “Your turn,” Dean gets out. “Where do you want me?”

Sam doesn’t answer with words, but moves back toward the closest bed, pulling Dean with him. He lies down and Dean straddles his hips, the close, hot pressure of their dicks a sweet comfort he’s missed for too long. He can’t even remember the last time he had sex with someone who isn’t his brother—which should not have the effect on him that it does.

He reaches down and takes Sam in hand, then wraps them both in his fist. Sam’s fingers slide into his hair and Sam moans softly in response, gripping Dean’s head with both hands and kissing him deeply. They’re both leaking, steady and slippery between Dean’s fingers, and Dean knows without a doubt that it won’t take much for either of them. It’s been years since the last time, but they might as well be teenagers again, furtive and desperate in the back seat of some old wreck in Bobby’s salvage yard. They rock together, both close to losing it, and Dean strokes a finger over the head of Sam’s dick, gathering his slick and stroking it roughly between them.

“Dean,” Sam gasps out, his hips rolling into Dean’s insistent rhythm, a sheen of sweat springing up across his bare chest. 

“Yeah, Sammy.” Dean’s close to losing it himself, but he doesn’t let up. He knows what he wants, the ache all too specific, but there’s truth, and then there’s truth.

Sam’s fist closes around his, and jerks them both into a blind and mindless release. 

* * *

“So, Rowena,” Dean says, a little while later, when words seem like a thing he can manage.

“What about her?” Sam asks. 

“You tell me,” Dean fires back. “Is this a thing I should be worried about?” 

Sam huffs a laugh. “Fuck if I know. You’re the one who let the cat out of the bag.”

Dean…can’t really argue with that. She’s one of the few people left in their lives that either of them care about. Giving an incredibly powerful, four-hundred-year-old witch intel she can use against them seems like pretty much a terrible idea, but Sam genuinely likes her. 

“Gotta admit she’s kinda hot. If you’re into that kind of thing.”

“Yeah?” Sam asks.

“I mean, I sort of owe her one.” Dean bends down and nuzzles Sam’s dick, which twitches in response. “Feel free to tell me more—in the interests of honesty.”


End file.
